| My wife rocks... |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|11:17 pm] |
We were watching "Sesame Street: Old School" Episode 1, for nostalgia sake.
One of the animated sections came up, and she starts singing "The Liberty Bell March" She gets so many nerd points for that.
(The animation of course reminding her of the Terry Gilliam style of Monty Python, hence the song...) |
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| trying out gogo... |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|08:32 pm] |
hello from 38,000 feet above some Southern State...
catching up on things that didn't happen at AC....
A few notes...
1) Gneech, if I ever mention my Aunt Eva again, hit me upside the head with the mallet.
2) To a certain ponytailed writer/renaissance dude, sorry for the Farrah Fawcett moments. Congrats AGAIN.
3) ConfusedOO--THANK YOU SO MUCH for the books--and again, GMLD doesn't have them so she will be olive with envy...(grin)
4) Mako, your name was mentioned in good stead by a few folks...
5) TK and Pan, thank you for being my good and evil angels...
6) Bill Holbrook and his special knack at diagnosing tire issues.
7) I'm sure I forgot something....nice to see quite a few folks
8) I MISSED Miz Mary Minch. Mary, we didn't get Mexicokes, but I found a place in the strip district that has them for NEXT YEAR.
it's getting a bit bumpy and am down to 18% on this battery, so adios..
MLD |
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| eBay is on to us... |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|10:29 pm] |
I was doing an eBay search for "costume mascot" this evening, and this is what I noticed came first in the "related searches" bar...
No comment :-P |
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| Yawn. Britten. |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|05:56 pm] |
The ever so charming Benjamin Britten. A man whose approach to composition could be summed up by one of his quotes:
"Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house-the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house."
It is quite true that Benjamin Britten's music and bricks have a lot in common. They are both rather painful to endure when they are hurled at you.
Aside from that, though, the quote makes no bloody sense since he's *driving* past the house, not *building* it, so his analogy misses the mark completely. And that is a more fitting analogy for his compositions than any other I could fathom, really.
All in all, I will be in the Picnic Scene from Albert Herring for the gala - but I swear to you this is probably the last time I shall ever sing a note Benjie Brits has ever composed. |
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| Postcon |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|06:46 pm] |
Things were a bit slow this year, but also i haven't had that much new, either. Saturday was rather slow all day until it picked up late in the afternoon.
Some post-dealersroom floppage in the hotel room has happened, as well as some dinner. mmmmpizzza.
I'm gonna head over to the zoo now, to swap sketchbooks and hang out wif folks. |
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| the way things were |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|08:36 pm] |
I can't think of any technology that has changed as much as computers. Having been in the games business for 27 odd years now it's remarkable to see just how far things have come (and to realise how much work has been involved in constantly having to adapt and learn as the technology changed underneath us).
These days I can expect to work on systems that have gigabytes of RAM and I have access to various computing cores that have a staggering amount of processing power. Some of my game levels use up to 16 internally rendered screens that are composited to form the final output. For each and every pixel on each and every one of those screens I can run fairly complex programs in parallel and still not drop any frames. It's amazing.
Before that, you felt yourself fortunate even to have a few internal buffers and to be able to do a bit of bilinear interpolation if you were lucky.
Before *that*, you were grateful to have a dot-addressable bitmap at all, and the bottleneck was how quickly you could simply move stuff around on it, never mind any fancy processing or anything.
Go back further and you had only character displays, if you were lucky with "sprites" on top. You could only move certain things in certain ways, and if you ran out of things and couldn't fool the machine into giving you any extra then you just had to grit your teeth and constrain your game design.
Back further still, and even sprites weren't there; you were lucky if you could change the bitmaps in your characters, and colour was only for posh people.
Go right back, close to the very dawn of game-historical time, and you find the Atari VCS. A machine so staggeringly primitive that it beggars belief that anybody got anything decent out of it, yet a machine which was on the market continuously for well over a decade, and upon which some absolute miracles of programming were wrought by some of the best assembly language programmers of all time.
The Atari VCS had 128 bytes of RAM. Not 128k, mind, I mean 128 individual little bytes of RAM. No separate space for system variables, no video RAM, just 128 bytes for everything. That and a chip called the TIA, Television Interface Adapter.
The TIA is kind of like a really primitive game display system - like something that you would expect to do no more than create PONG with - but which someone forgot to fully build. So it'll do some stuff for you but you basically have to do most of the tricky stuff on your own, in software, with bugger all RAM and a slow 8-bit CPU. It was known as a tough beast to code on and the number of crap games that came out for it is a testament to the difficulty of the coding and the fact that most people who attempted the task weren't up to it.
However it was this very nature of the machine which inspired true brilliance from some who coded it, brilliance which brought into existence games which should never have been possible on such a limited, primitive old beast, and which kept the VCS alive for many years after it ought to have sunk into obscurity.
It's not even dead yet, really. In these days where most coding is done in high level languages and abstracted so far away from the underlying hardware that writing optimised code is almost an irrelevance, there are a few hobbyists who have taken to coding the old VCS just for the fun and challenge of it. It's easy to find the tools you need, and you don't even need a real VCS; there are great emulators available for free.
I kinda miss the days of hacking 6502 myself, and I've never programmed the VCS before, but always thought that one day I'd enjoy the challenge of at least getting something simple going on there. Since in the week I've been super busy finishing up things for the imminent release of GR+++, and today was too rubbish and rainy to go out, I've taken to doing a bit of VCS noodling myself; that picture shows as far as I've got :). It may look a bit rubbish but trust me just getting the llama and goat up there and some colour in them takes a fair bit. The change from solid colour to Venetian blind colours in the background occurs at that exact horizontal position due to counting out the precise time taken by every instruction in your inner loop.
OK, I can't really explain more without sounding excessively nerdy. But it's fun and strangely enough quite relaxing :). And it's fun to do some proper manly coding again, bang on the metal, and remember where we came from and where we've been :). |
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| LOL |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|03:20 pm] |
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| omfg *squeal* |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|12:02 pm] |
Forget the video, that guy can't play. Posted for the remixed music of my fav NES game ever. |
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| The Computer Is Your Friend: The only way AOL can still make money |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|09:43 am] |
The link is to the BoingBoingGadgets article, but the original story is from the Wall Street Journal.
Apparently, AOL is "upgrading" customer accounts, then sending the bills off to collection agencies -- without actively notifying the customers in question.
This, it seems, includes people who have signed up for nothing more than AIM service.
Hooray. =P
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| Looking for Spinelicker. |
[Jul. 1st, 2009|01:15 pm] |
Hi all! Not a warning, just curious if anybody knows if Spinelicker is around? I commissioned her for a traditional badge at last year's Anthrocon, and I know she finished it because she posted it to FA. It was great! Unfortunately, she appears to have disappeared off of FA and I haven't been able to get in contact with her by commenting on her page or sending notes.
I really, really want that badge-- it came out great. I hate to pester her, but I haven't sent any notes in a while and I'm not about to post randomly on her personal LJ about it unless I absolutely have to. It's simply that I know she's been around at cons and the like, so I know she hasn't totally dropped off the face of the earth.
I'd be thrilled if somebody could put me in contact with her or something! It's only a matter of shipping it out, after all. Thanks. |
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| Steve McNair...RIP, Brother. |
[Jul. 4th, 2009|11:18 pm] |
When is this shit going to stop? EX-Titan/Raven's QB found dead, shot in the head. God Bless you Steve. |
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| Happy Fourth |
[Jul. 4th, 2009|04:22 pm] |
Here you have a few words from Penn and Teller (well, Penn really) during their Vegas show, which I consider appropriate for today. |
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| 36 |
[Jul. 4th, 2009|12:37 pm] |
Today I am 36.
That's one more than 35.
But it's also one less than 37. |
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| Happy 4th of July |
[Jul. 4th, 2009|08:38 am] |
Here in the U.S., it's Independence Day. DEFINITELY not to be confused with Independence Day. The celebrations usually involve burning meat, sucking down "cold ones", and blowing stuff up. And getting great discount prices on refrigerators.
What are your plans for the day? Mine involve a concert at 11:00 a.m., a Dr. Horrible panel at 2:00, hanging out with folks at the con, a quiet dinner, and then MC'ing a masquerade, followed by a little open filk (if I make it that long). |
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| Going pink |
[Jul. 4th, 2009|01:25 am] |
The funeral services for Teh's grandmother begin Sunday with the visitation and then Monday is the funeral.
Last week when in CR doing my shopping I picked up a package of floral butterflies that are made out of colored feathers. Knowing that Grandma wouldn't be with us long I wanted to have them just in case she went more quickly than was expected. Less than a week later she would be gone and no one expected it to be so soon.
Grandma loved butterflies. She had butterfly curtains, figurines, pictures. She had them all over the house. So on Thursday when we went to order our flower arrangement I bought the butterflies and asked them to incorporate them in and make it beautiful. They said they would.
Now on the other end of the spectrum Grandma hated those blasted plastic pink flamingos that people put up in their yards.
One year, very mysteriously some of those pink flamingos ended up in the yards of several family members, ours included. It was great! Grandma and my MIL thought it was Uncle John. I don't remember who Uncle John thought it was. Thing is, no one suspected us for a long time. It was hilarious!! Grandma got a good chuckle out of it. After that the pink flamingos thing was an inside joke.
For years Teh and I would hide a small stuffed pink flamingo in Grandma's and Grandpa's Christmas tree. I would distract them in the kitchen while Teh would hide it. When Grandma found it she would call it an ugly thing and laugh and laugh. Funny thing is often times she would leave it in the tree.
After we started joking about the long legged blushing birds Grandma told us that the lab in our little hospital was wall to wall Pink Flamingos. She was in the lab often enough for blood work and what not that she would tell us when they would acquire a new flamingo item.
It's been a few years since the flamingo thing died down. We were going to substitute a pink flamingo for the stork and stick it in her yard with baby booties to tell them that we were pregnant, but for one reason or another that fell by the wayside. Hiding the thing in the Christmas tree stopped when Grandma couldn't decorate the big tree anymore and went to a tiny table top tree instead.
Tonight I was doing something online and came across a flamingo and the idea came to me... we should buy a potted plant and put one of those whirligig flamingos in it and take it to the services with a note that says something like Thanks for the laugh/memories or some such thing! I think Grandma would have gotten a big kick out of it. Teh isn't certain that it's in good taste.
We discussed the idea of taking one of the big ones and just letting it lean up against something. We also talked about putting it in a potted plant that is already there, but I didn't want someone else getting the blame especially since few people know about the joke anyway. Then we talked about taking the temperature of the services before bringing it in. Teh is concerned about how some family members are taking it. I think the family is doing remarkably well. It wasn't a surprise, and it wasn't as if she had her whole life yet to live. I am hoping that this is a celebration of life.
So.. here's the question. Feel free to answer.
Poll #1424907 Going Pink?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: AllShould we take a plant with a pink flamingo to the funeral services? |
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